randomWalks - 2024

To know that the world is baffling, to know that you’re doing the best you can, so you don’t have to blame yourself for your choices: I don’t have any advice other than that.

When You’re Sick, You’ll Wait for the Answer, but None Will Come - The Stranger by Conner Habib

→ 11:37 PM, Dec 19

A situationist statement designed to destroy the other records around it

The Durutti Column’s 1980 debut album — confusingly titled The Return of the Durutti Column—originally came packaged in a sandpaper sleeve, a detail that couldn’t have been more at odds with the music inside. The sandpaper was a Situationist prank dreamed up in part by Factory Records boss Tony Wilson

Time Was Gigantic… When We Were Kids | Pitchfork

Under Tony Wilson’s command, Joy Division and A Certain Ratio assembled at Alan Erasmus' flat in Manchester. They were reportedly paid £15 each and given a pile of 4,000 sheets of sandpaper, with Ian Curtis taking on the bulk of the work while his bandmates watched a porn film in another room. Despite Curtis’s efforts, Factory creative director Peter Saville was underwhelmed: “To me, it looked like a DIY thing that was, really, the antithesis of what I was trying to do. It looked a bit homemade.”

The Return Of The Durutti Column – The Story Behind The Sleeve – Long Live Vinyl

The album sleeve is a very rare collector’s items as there were only 2000 made, and there are 3 different variations of spray-paint on the sleeve. … The sleeve design was inspired by a 1959 book called Mémoires by Guy Debord, a Marxist theorist, writer and filmmaker.

Durutti Column: The most punk album cover ever. - Audio and Sound

→ 1:14 PM, Nov 1

This is an AI Free Zone! Text created by Large Language Models is spreading rapidly across the Internet. It’s well-written, artificial, frequently inaccurate. If you find a mistake on Spaceweather.com, rest assured it was made by a real human being.

SpaceWeather.com – News and information about meteor showers, solar flares, auroras, and near-Earth asteroids

→ 8:23 PM, Apr 21

I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name.

Rod McKuen was the best-selling poet in American history. What happened?

Did I write this?!

→ 3:15 PM, Apr 19

When critics dismiss AI outright, I think in many cases this weakens the criticism, as readers who have used and benefited from AI tools think “wait, that’s not been my experience at all”.

Molly White: AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it?

→ 1:04 PM, Apr 19

Too skeptical to make many friends there, I frequently rode my electric scooter around campus to systematically sample the offerings at each of the 19 cafés, and then take advantage of the arsenal of targeted functions on the Japanese toilets in every bathroom.

Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex, a critical examination of Google’s labor practices at the MoMA

“The day after shooting the video, I was fired.”

→ 10:13 PM, Mar 5

Eagle Pass’ Shelby Park — which, in a you-can’t-make-this-up level of irony, is named for the rebel Gen. Joseph Orville Shelby, said to have planted the last Confederate battle flag in the river in 1865 as he fled to Mexico

Eagle Pass is today’s Fort Sumter. Biden must federalize the Texas National Guard.

(Despite appearances, this is not an “impending second U.S. civil war” fansite.)

→ 11:52 PM, Feb 4

Q. We live in representative democracies where certain liberties are respected. We vote for the policies and the people we want to represent us. And if we don’t get the things we want, it doesn’t give us license to then say, “We’re now engaging in destructive behavior.” Right? Either we’re against political violence or not. We can’t say we’re for it when it’s something we care about and against it when it’s something we think is wrong.

A. Of course we can. Why not?

How This Climate Activist Justifies Political Violence - The New York Times

→ 6:49 PM, Jan 16